Foreign Food
by ion bond
Summary: Being thrown off a roof by an old friend is no picnic. Neither is being caught in midair. An ML story following the events of "Prodigy," featuring Jon Darius backstory. Action/angst. NOW COMPLETE!
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This is my first Dark Angel fic and my first time using the site, so I hope it all checks out. DA does not belong to me. This takes place right after "Prodigy."

-2019-

"The hardest ingredient to find isn't the spices," Logan said. He dumped the chopped onions off the cutting board into the melted butter with the flat of his knife and paused expectantly.

Max leaned against the low counter and recrossed her legs. "Well, what?" she asked. She was playing along, which Logan appreciated. He was trying for their usual tone, but he could tell he was a little off the mark tonight. He couldn't seem to get the roof of the Steinlitz Hotel out of his head, where it loomed a lot higher than five stories. Given her part in the hostage situation, Logan would have thought that Max might be on the same page, but supersoldier stoic that she was, she wasn't showing it. She seemed more hungry than anything else.

Well, she had said that she looked out for her meal ticket, Logan remembered. He added the puréed tart apple, chili peppers and garlic to the onions in the big dutch oven on the range and gave the mixture a quick stir. "Spices have been a luxury item since trading began," he said, measuring out three careful tablespoons of yellow curry powder. "Could you pass me the flour? Biggest canister."

"Sure thing." Max handed it to him without their fingers touching. Not that they would have anyway, if he wasn't thinking so damn hard about it.

He reached down to rummage in the cabinet for the next ingredient. "_This_, however," he said, placing the can by the stove with a flourish, "you used to be able to buy for ninety-nine cents."

The writing on the label was in Thai. Max raised an eyebrow. "Coconut milk?"

"I've been saving it for over a year, if you can believe it." He sighed. "A decade ago, you could pick this stuff up in any Asian grocery. Now it's worth its weight in gold. Coconuts aren't exactly local."

"And yet your supply hasn't dried up." Max smiled sideways at him. "Lucky me."

Logan shrugged dismissively. "Eating well these days is more about being a good scavenger than about being a good cook."

"If that was true," said Max, "I would have just eaten with Kendra and saved myself a bike ride in the rain. Way I see it, eating well is and has always been about having good taste."

"Well, thanks." He let himself glide backward from the stove. "You know, I really I wish I could cook you a meal, just once, with access to all the right ingredients."

Max leaned back comfortably. "Real smooth, Romeo. I'll bet you did some pretty solid trade with the shorties, back in the day."

Logan hated the fact that she seemed to be so sure that he was flirting with her, even though that was, in fact, what he was doing. If she could see through the quid pro quo to what he felt for her, he wished she would at least have the decency not to tease him about it. Then again, it was hard to blame her for being flip. Maybe she saw it as a way to let him down in a way that was less painful than a straight rejection. Her extraordinary beauty was seldom off Logan's mind for long, but he tended to forget that it meant she dealt with infatuated assholes all the time, asking her out when she asked for a signature, staring at her breasts, making stupid romantic pronouncements in the street, probably. She was used to jokers like him.

The only thing to do was to tease right back at her, and that was what he was having trouble with, today. "Exactly how old do you think I am, anyway? What do you mean, 'back in the day?'" He'd been going for comically affronted, but he could hear that he sounded testy instead.

"You know," Max said, "back when you had everything you needed to woo a woman," and he felt it like a punch in the gut. "Ingredients, I mean," she added quickly. "Did you use to cook for females before the Pulse killed Seattle's gourmet experience?"

He was being sensitive. He tried to think seriously about her question. "Sometimes," he said. He'd been into cooking as a hobby since his early adolescence, but he couldn't remember doing it on a regular basis for the lovers or friends he'd had in the past. Cooking was personal for him. Pre-Pulse - and even post-Pulse, but pre-wheelchair - eating out had always been social. "Not as much, I guess," he admitted. "I used to take women to restaurants, when there were more to choose from. Ordering well from a menu is a skill. Picking the right wine, the right appetizer ... it's a matter of taste, too."

"Original Cindy always says that you a balla."

Logan snorted. "A what?"

"You know. Balla, shot-calla. A high roller. A playa-playa. " Max smirked at his reaction. "Well, come on. You're sitting here telling me about your old dates."

"Because you were prying," he said sharply. He shrugged, looking over at the curry on the stove. "Anyway, sometimes, food is just business."

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Dark Angel does not belong to me.

"I interviewed him a few years back." -- Logan Cale, Prodigy

-2014-

The grubby Lebanese restaurant did not have menus, but Logan had now memorized both of the lunch options that were written on the chalkboard by the door. He kicked nervously at the leg of the folding card table at which he was seated and checked his watch. Jon Darius was late.

His friends always acted surprised to hear him say it, but it was true: Logan didn't particularly feel at ease talking to strangers face-to-face. As a rookie reporter, he had once tried to explain to his uncle Jonas that he went into journalism because he wanted to change the world, not because he was good at it. Now, seven years' experience under his belt, working the local news desk at what was left of the Pacific Free Press and writing for two underground political magazines on the side, Logan was confident that he was, in fact, good at journalism, or good at enough of it. That didn't make the prospect of going on something very similar to a date with a complete stranger any more appealing. Researching an assignment before an interview, amassing the facts and ordering them afterward for the reader to understand, these parts of his job were more Logan's speed.

Tough, he told himself, toying with the laminated placemat in front of him, trying to get his head together. The restaurant, if you could fairly call it that, was located inside a derelict Laidlaw school bus sitting on its axles in the Lot, a shantytown that had sprung up in the most distant arm of Sector Thirteen. In better days, the buses that served the Seattle Public School System had been parked here only at night. The schools had reopened now, of course, but there was no money for maintaining and fueling a fleet of buses, even if they hadn't been so thoroughly picked over for parts that they were no longer vehicles at all. Squatters had quickly discovered the hulls, and the buses became dwellings -- or, as in the case of this place, which was called Two Cousins -- businesses. The buses that still had intact windows were relatively warm, and the tiers of cushioned benches made beds for hundreds of Seattle's homeless.

The seats in the Two Cousins' bus had been removed to make room for three tables, all in a line and all with a view of the neighbors' laundry hanging out to dry just outside the double set of windows. The cooking was done in a tin-roofed lean-to addition against the flank of the bus outside. Logan glanced at the menu again. He had already decided on the kubideh. The old men at the next table were eating them with pita and what seemed to be a salad of minced parsley and onions, and it looked OK.

Logan had never met Jon Darius, but he wasn't surprised by the type of place he'd chosen to be interviewed. The Lot was isolated, but not deserted, and more than a little Wild West. Sector patrols mostly left it alone; it was a tight-knit and fairly entrenched community. Darius probably had some friends here.

Over the years, Logan had watched the May 22nd Movement grow from its origins as a pre-Pulse neo-Luddite independent political party to a full-blown terrorist organization. Darius and his followers were better at blowing up planes than the Unabomber had ever been. Hundreds had died when they planted a bomb in the twelfth-floor corporate headquarters of Expediters International this year. They were kicking the techno-state while it was down, that was for sure.

Logan rubbed his hand through his hair. He had a formed opinion about the subject of this assignment -- he always did, no matter how hard he tried -- but he wasn't going to let it intrude on the interview he conducted.

One thing he respected about Darius -- even after the extensive prep Logan had done, he had very little idea of what the guy looked like. May 22nd might be nuts, but they weren't a personality cult. According to his research, Darius started his political career getting teargassed with an anarchist student group at the protests against the WTO Ministerial Conference that was held in Seattle in November of '99. His arrest photo, which Logan had pulled along with his complete police file, showed a skinny, scared-looking kid with swollen eyes. In his late teens, Darius got serious and narrowed his focus. He worked as a paid organizer for the Earth Liberation Front, going door to door in Seattle's hippie neighborhoods asking for campaign donations and a return to a simpler way of life. He must have talked to thousands of people, but there were no known photographs of him from this era, and Darius remained under the radar while he was building up his own more extreme movement in '09 and '10, keeping his ego out of things in order to be more effective. That showed circumscription and, Logan thought, sanity.

If he wasn't mistaken, the man coming in the door of the bus now must be Darius. He mounted the two steps, spoke briefly to the waitress near the driver's seat, and turned toward Logan's table.

"I'm Jon," he said, walking over. He was slightly built, with a goatee and dark hair that was longer than Logan's, but neater. He might have been twenty-five. "This is Lydia."

His companion was a big woman with plastic-framed glasses who looked American Indian to Logan. He took her for a handler or bodyguard of some sort. "Hi," she said.

Logan stood up from the card table. "Logan Cale," he said, offering his hand first to Lydia, and then to Darius. "Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Darius."

"Really, Jon is fine," said the other man. He was disarmingly young, Logan thought. "It's what I'm used to. We're a movement of equals." Inside the restaurant, although the men eating kubideh seemed to be paying them no mind, he didn't call his organization by its name. He nodded toward Logan's handheld digital recorder and moved to sit. "Shall we get started?"

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Dark Angel does not belong to me. Thanks for your kind reviews. I'm not down with the etiquette -- do people tend to respond individually to feedback here, the way they do on LJ? In any case, here's the next ML bit. Chapters will probably stay short, but I hope to keep them coming.

-2019-

"Believe me," said Max, her dark eyes narrowing, "if cooking for me is a chore, don't bother. I do your Eyes Only shit in return for you finding my sibs -- that's the deal. That's the extent of the business we have together. I don't need you to feed me."

She was, if possible, even more beautiful when she was angry. "That's not what I meant," said Logan. The tooth of the can opener bit into the metal of the can of coconut milk. Max was standing now. In a second, she would walk out. Logan kept his eyes fixed on the can in his lap. She was right, the food, the chess, the keeping-each-other-company was not a part of their arrangement. She could stop coming over any time.

"Look," Max said. "I've had a rough couple of days. I know you have, too. Excuse me for trying to introduce a topic of conversation that isn't the military goons out to terminate me or the asshole who tossed you off a roof."

Logan poked at the now-severed lid of the can, trying to remove it without getting his fingers in the contents or cutting himself on the sharp edge. "Ouch," he muttered, frisbeeing the lid into the recycling bin. Two points.

Her voice softened. "I'm sorry," she said. "That's not what I meant to say, either." She slid tentatively up onto one of Logan's bar stools. "I don't want to fight. Can we just start tonight over?"

Logan took the can back to the stove without speaking, trying to wrench himself out of his sulk. Max could shift emotional gears a lot faster than he could; he supposed it came from having a revved-up processor. He knew that refusing to accept her overture would mean eating a lot of Indian food all by himself, followed by an evening of sitting by the penthouse windows watching the sky go dark until all he could see was his own reflection. He'd been doing that too much lately, and it wasn't always easy to look out, not down.

He wasn't mad at Max, really -- if he were in her shoes, Logan acknowledged, he wouldn't know how to deal with him, either. He was frustrated at the situation, that was all. Good thing that was nothing new.

He took a deep breath. " A do-over. I'd like that. Truce?"

"Aiight." Max rolled her shoulders and stood, spine tensed but fluent, in that distinctive cat-burgler way she had. Logan felt his skin prickle at her proximity as she positioned herself behind him, craning over his shoulder to look at the simmering curry as he spooned in the thick, fragrant white solid that collected at the top of the can, the fattiest and best part of the coconut milk. The end of a loose piece of Max's hair tickled the top of his ear. She was very close. He tried not to imagine what this blocking might mean, if things were different between them.

"Mmm," Max breathed, "that smells really good," and Logan remembered the feeling of being held in her ams as they crashed through plate-glass together. The helpless sensation of falling had been terrifying, but the memory, only a day removed, was now tinged with guilty longing.

You're sick, Cale, he told himself, but he was starving for someone to touch him. Not because they were going through his PT routine with him or saving his numb ass from certain death, but because they wanted to.

It was his own fault. He did it to himself -- he was the one who had discouraged her from touching him. OK, she almost certainly didn't desire him the way he did her, and she wasn't exactly beating down the door to pull him into bed with her under non-emergency circumstances, but Logan was aware of how hard he tried to avoid even her occasional friendly gestures. It was as much for his own ego as it was for her sake. Every instance of a hand laid on his shoulder brought up the sad fact of how much taller she was than him.

Max never, thank god, tried pushing his chair, like Darius had done in the carpeted hotel corridor yesterday, the gun in the terrorist's right hand nudging Logan's shoulder with every stride.

Logan shook his head sharply in disbelief. He wasn't going to think about Darius.

"What?" said Max, stepping back, as highly attuned to his body language as was usual for her.

"Nothing." Val was right about one thing, Logan thought, putting down the can. Something was blocking the flow of his chi.

"I'm getting the sense that I'm in the way, standing here."

"Perish the thought," Logan said. He crumbled half a vegetable soup cube into the sauce, which was thickening nicely. "You're my sous-chef."

"I don't know, Logan. What does that entail?"

"I need your special powers."

Max tilted her head. "I don't just leap tall buildings in a single bound -- I also burn water."

"I wouldn't have it any other way." He grabbed a towel and wiped off the traces of sticky bullion from the tips of his fingers before tipping the bowl of cooked cauliflower and red-skinned potatoes he had set aside into the pan. "Now, we cover it, and wait. Oh, and cook the rice. Do you think you can handle that?"

She took down a smaller saucepan. "Like I said, I'm not makin' any promises."

"How about we go step by step," Logan said. "First, three handfuls of rice. Burlap sack in the cabinet to the right of the sink."

"Roger that," said Max. "Do you think Jude the wunderkind can cook?"

"Probably," said Logan. "But how fast do you think he can he disassemble an M24 SWS assault rifle?"

"I think we X5s were supposed to get our piano playing and languages later in the training regimen, when we were older, but we skipped out," said Max. "Lydecker clearly had his priorities messed up."

"Do you think so?" Logan asked curiously. His politics certainly suggested that this was true, but at the same time, the things Max could do seemed like such an integral part of her. As much as she talked about being a freak military experiment, he couldn't imagine her downgrading for a more civilian skill set.

Max shrugged one shoulder. "With my brain I think so, yeah." Her eyes were fixed, looking at something over Logan's head. "I know what he trained us to do was wrong."

He wondered what her instincts were telling her. "Rinse off that rice," he said.

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Dark Angel doesn't belong to me. Sorry about the wait on this one, kids -- there's some Logan Cale: Man of Action to make up for it.

-2014-

It's about priorities," Darius said, mopping up the sauce on his plate with the last triangle of pita bread. "Disintegrating infrastructure, no healthcare coverage, terrible options for childcare and schools . . . these are things our national and state governments have turned a blind eye to in the last five years, leaving every citizen to fend for himself. "

Darius had been talking for about an hour and a half now. He was a good interview subject, intelligent and articulate, and passionate about a variety of topics. Moreover, it was easy to keep him going. The old men at the table next to them had finished their meal and left, only to be replaced by a young couple with a baby in a sling who ordered hummus and grape leaves and talked loudly in Korean. Logan watched the careful way Lydia looked at them when they came in and wondered what it must be like to be a wanted man. "I don't know, Jon," Logan said now. "The issues you mention are acknowledged as problems by most officials, who say that they don't have the resources to deal with them."

"Well, exactly. That's what I mean by priorities. We've been told over and over again that when the economy stabilizes, these things will be taken care of," Darius said. "Meanwhile, the military is driving around in GPS-equipped rolling labs with touch-screen monitors." His voice tended to raise in tone when he was excited, Logan had noticed. _Prone to histrionics? _he wrote in tiny letters on his notepad. "They're looking for me, you know," Darius said. "There have been two attempts on my life in the past year. They're spending your tax dollars to hunt me."

Logan looked over at Lydia, who was staring out the bus windows. "Well, you have broken the law," he said carefully. He hadn't touched directly on the Expediters International bombing yet -- he didn't want to shut his subject down. Still, he could hardly go on avoiding asking about it.

"It's true," Darius said, "Not that I'm apologizing for doing so."

"Duly noted."

"Although it's hard not to take these attempts personally --" and here, Darius smiled, "-- I don't mean to sound like I don't see where they're coming from. But I'm not Robin Hood or Che Guevara, here. Sadly, I'm not leading a revolution yet. All hubris aside, the movement isn't the destabilizing influence I hope it will someday become. When finances are so tight, putting down dissidents shouldn't be anywhere near the top of the government's to-do list. I mean, there are hungry children in Seattle, and where is the money going? I've heard stories about government-funded programs into genetic research with kids as test-subjects -- millions in overhead, morally suspect methods, no tangible benefits to society at large. No wonder there isn't any money for social programs. This is how technology is wielded by these Cold War-minded assholes! The whole thing is fucked." Darius looked at the recorder. "Excuse me. I hope that won't make it into your article."

"Don't worry about it," said Logan. There was a lot he would probably have to cut for this interview to be published in the so-called Free Press, he thought ruefully. "Do you think the American public shares your priorities?"

"I'd like to say yes, but honestly? Who knows." Darius pushed at a temple with his knuckle. "The government has let us down in ways that everyone can see, but no one seems to be willing to talk about it. As much as anything else, we are fighting for open discourse in American soci--"

Logan felt the gunshot before he heard it, a stinging across his bicep that felt something like burning himself while taking a tray out of the oven, or like the swipe of his father's belt across his bare, nine-year-old ass. "Ow!" he yelled nonsensically as he watched Lydia pull Darius under their table. He looked over his shoulder, resisting, for now, the temptation to glance down at his smarting arm. The waitress was nowhere to be seen, but the young couple were still very much present; the man was advancing with an ugly black plastic weapon drawn, the woman was hunched over the infant sling around her neck. Could that possibly be an actual baby they had with them, Logan wondered, or was that a decoy to lower Darius's bodyguard's suspicion? No, it was real. It was crying in a way that made the hairs on the back of Logan's neck stand up.

Lydia was busy overturning their table for cover and getting Darius behind it, but it was only when he heard the second gunshot that Logan realized he was still stupidly sitting in the line of fire. Luckily, he was no one's top priority; the gunman seemed as disinterested in him as the two terrorists behind their makeshift fortifications were. He was trapped in the middle. Talk about journalistic neutrality.

"Are you stupid? Get down," Lydia hissed, drawing her own not-unsubstantial-looking gun from a shoulder holster as Logan dropped bonelessly but painfully from his chair to his hands and knees, clutching his digital recorder.

"Screw that," said Darius, his sharp voice muffled. "We need to get out of here!"

Logan remembered school bus safety drills from his childhood. The red handles indicate the windows that can be used as emergency exits. If the bus should flip over, a hatch in the roof can be opened. The windshield sits rests in a rubber frame and can be kicked out onto the hood.

That was not going to help them. The gunman was between them and the windshield. A shot from Lydia smashed a window above the male attacker's left shoulder, and, devoid of cover, he dropped to one knee and fired again in their direction. The table buckled, this time, its legs shuddering with the impact. "Goddamn!" said Lydia, as though she were the one with a new hole and not the furniture. At the front end of the bus, the assassin's companion -- who had, Logan noticed now, much curlier hair than Asian women usually did -- was bent over, removing the cloth sling and the twisting, writhing baby within. She placed it gently on the floor of the bus, right on the rubber of what had been the aisle, when there had been seats, and efficiently pulled two pistols from her own waistband. Logan could see the baby's little angry face, looking at him.

The back boor, obviously. Logan tensed himself on his forearms, ready to push himself up and run, as Lydia fired a round at the young man's head, and it must have been a hit, he was twisting backward, falling, but no, not falling. He was still on his feet, his torso arcing back toward them, the nose of his gun still seeking them out.

"He ducked," said Darius wonderingly, but Logan had his back to all of them now. The woman, too. There could be three firearms pointing at him, for all he knew. Please don't let me get shot, he thought. His foot connected with the safety handle. The door popped open and he spilled out, his momentum sending him tumbling down face first onto the hot Lot-pavement outside.

"Run!" yelled Lydia, and Logan had no idea if she was talking to himself or to Darius. Not that it mattered. Logan was already stumbling to his feet, stuffing the recorder into his pants pocket so that he could squeeze his wounded arm tight as he took off around the neighboring bus.

It was funny. They had been speaking Korean before -- Logan had heard enough to be pretty sure. But their baby had pale blue eyes.

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: I have no rights to Dark Angel. This chapter, we're back to Max and Logan. Thanks for the comments.

-2019-

"Cover the rice in the pot with about an inch of water and we're good to go," Logan directed.

"Gotcha. Hey, I've got a question for you about yesterday," said Max.

Logan got out of the way as she moved to the sink. "Oh? Are we talking about that, now?"

"Not if you don't want to."

"I thought you didn't want to, is all."

"I can handle it, if you can. Whatever." She was getting her back up again, which was just great, Logan thought. He was only trying to follow her lead. "Never mind," she said, and the lights in the penthouse dimmed before going out entirely. Beyond the picture windows, the neighboring high-rises went dark.

"Shit."

"Now what?" Max asked, sounding relieved at the distraction.

"We won't be able to light a second burner without the electricity, but the sauce is done anyway, and the gas shouldn't be affected. Can you move the curry off the stove and turn the front burner up?"

"Yeah, all right. " She shook the uncooked rice in the pot. "Do I have to do anything to this?"

"No," said Logan. "Just put it on and let it boil."

"These brownouts bite," said Max. He could see her faintly in the blue glow of the lone burner, leaning back against the oven door and looking at him. "Lydecker says that the Pulse toughened the world." Sometimes she was so inscrutable, but other times, Logan could practically see her change tacks, watch the boom swing around in the sudden wind of her thoughts. It reminded him of how young she was -- and how dangerous. If she was ready to consider her old enemy out loud, he wasn't going to stop her.

"True," he said cautiously. "World's so damn tough these days, the cans I put in the 'recycling' will end up flattened and nailed to someone's roof before Sanitation ever comes and picks them up."

One corner of her mouth twisted up. "I think he meant more in a moral sense."

"Like 'suffering builds character'?" Logan laughed humorlessly. This was one of his new least-favorite adages. Although no one had ever said it to his face, he sometimes suspected certain people -- Bling, for example -- of wishing that he would build more character more quickly.

Max rolled her eyes. "Yeah, that kind of thing. We're all better Americans now, just like his kids were better soldiers after being held underwater for five minutes at a stretch."

"Excuse me?" That jerked his attention from the slow progress of the development of his saintly cripple virtue. Three minutes, if Logan was remembering right, was how long Harry Houdini had to held his breath to perform the Chinese Water Torture Cell escape. Five didn't sound physically possible, shark DNA or no. Max, who was now staring dispassionately over the top of his head, rarely talked about the specifics of her childhood at Manticore. He couldn't gauge for sure whether she was exaggerating for effect. She must be.

"Be careful, Logan," Nathan Herrero, his mentor at the Pacific Free Press had warned him once, years ago. "Whenever you take a shine to an interview subject, you lose your killer instinct."

"Did he do that to you, Max?" Logan asked.

"Nah," said Max, flashing him a bright, brief, meaningless smile. He could practically hear doors slamming shut. "It's just funny -- all I've heard for the last ten years is how much better everything was before. It figures that Lydecker would be the one person to say different. I mean, that alone proves he's whacked, right?"

"There are some things I like better about now," Logan said.

"Hold up -- like what? Deprived childhood here. I don't have much room to compare, you know?"

He shrugged. "Less air pollution. Easier to get organic food. Families and friends forming networks to take care of each other. Affordable hand-knit sweaters."

"Ha ha. So, old homespun values, basically?"

"Yeah, pretty much. But seriously, I've always been in favor of those things. Even when they weren't cool. And then the Pulse made them happen, along with all of the bad -- like some kind of twisted wish fulfillment. I wouldn't have inflicted it on the rest of the world if it had been up to me, believe me."

"So, you don't agree with Lydecker," Max stated carefully. He recognized her playin'-it-cool voice.

"It seems to me like Lydecker doesn't trust people to make their own decisions," Logan said. "Darius is like that, too."

"The terrorist guy?"

"Yep," said Logan. "One of the Pulse's biggest fans."

"What did he do, anyway."

"He did a lot of things." Was she old enough to remember any of the worst May 22nd attacks? He counted back, trying to calculate. "Where were you in 2013, Max? Foster care?"

"Please. I was so over that by then." Logan shot her a questioning look, and after a moment's pause, she continued. "I was here in Seattle, I guess. That was before I hooked up with Cindy, definitely before we were riding Pony. I was just ... chilling. Living with this guy, Josue. We hung out around the arcades near Market Street a lot. I hustled video games way before I ever hustled pool."

Our final Double Jeopardy category, Alex: Periods of Max Guevara's Life About Which Logan Knows Nothing.

"Oh," he said. "And you were how old? Fifteen?"

"Thirteen or fourteen, best I can figure. Look," she said, clearly not interested in discussing it any further, "this was what I wanted to ask you before you practically jumped down my throat."

"What?" said Logan, needled.

"Darius. How you got him to trade yourself for all the females. I know you've got the gift of gab and all, but that's a tall order."

"Take the rice off now," said Logan. "It was his idea."

"Beg pardon?"

Logan grimaced. "Jon Darius and I knew each other."

"He wanted his hands on you that bad, and you went in there knowing it?" Max whistled softly. "Wow."

"Not know each other in the way you and Lydecker know each other," Logan said. He wasn't sure how he could explain it to her. "I don't think punting me off the top of the Steinlitz was his grand plan for revenge all along. I think he wanted to talk to me." He looked at his hands in the dark. "We used to be friends."

"Friends? How's that?"

"Well," said Logan. "I interviewed him."

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Shorter chapter this time. I don't own Dark Angel.

-2014-

At first, as he ran, Logan could hear gunshots behind him. He counted, one-two-three-four. Then, no more. The only sound behind him was Darius breathing hard to keep up as they sprinted for the fence at the far side of the Lot. Logan was still in pretty decent shape; his college basketball years were not yet too distant. He really should make time to play more pick-up games.

Not important, he admonished himself, not right now. He wasn't thinking straight. It was funny, what came to mind when he was scared out of his mind. Why was it so quiet?

It was the middle of the day, and this was usually a busy area. Logan hadn't been in any condition to notice who was outside Two Cousins when he half-fell out the back door, but the noise would probably have drawn a crowd. Now, he and Darius pushed past people, curious onlookers and Lot residents doing errands. Were they being pursued? He hoped that no bystanders would get shot on their account -- Jesus, his arm hurt. Behind him, Darius's breath was coming in ragged gasps.

This is all your fault, you motherfucker, Logan thought.

"Come on," he said, reaching blindly behind him with his good arm for the other man's shirt. "Back here!"

The buses parked right up against the chain link formed a shady tunnel too narrow and too clotted with windblown garbage for them to be able to run full-out, but that was OK -- it was protected and deserted, and Darius was slowing anyway. This was going to buy them time, that was all. Logan looked for a break in the fence, but they weren't on the side of the perimeter he'd expected. He'd gotten turned around somehow, and he didn't know this part of the Lot. Never before had he wished for the sector police.

They were nowhere near far enough from the restaurant for the fighting to be out of hearing-range -- it must have stopped, one way or another. Logan wasn't going to think about that right now.

He remembered the way the man with the gun had bent over backwards to dodge a bullet. Where was he now?

"Here," Logan ordered, pushing Darius ahead of him into the angled space under a bus with a cracked front axle. "Quick." He was hyperaware of the strangled sound of his own quiet voice. He crawled in after Darius, grabbing double handfuls of the plastic bags and newspapers that had been packed into the alley between the buses and the fence, pulling the trash in behind them to camouflage the hiding place.

"Where's Lydia? Is she back --"

Logan clapped his hand -- the hand connected to the arm that had just been shot, his body reminded him emphatically -- over Darius's mouth to shut him up.

He was angry that the other man had asked. Jon Darius had a lot of people after him. Even in Logan's liberal estimation, he deserved to have people after him. Logan and and his editor had considered what his status as a wanted man might mean when Logan first agreed to interview him. It was part of their job description, just like part of Darius's job description was supposed to be understanding that who he was -- terrorist, outlaw, freedom fighter, whatever -- might get his people hurt.

Based on Logan's brief acquaintance with Lydia, on the way he had seen her cooly watch the rows of windows at Two Cousins, back straight and patient, while he and the May 22nd leader talked and ate and talked, and how quickly she had reacted when they were attacked, well, she had known what she was doing. She was good at it.

Am I good at what I do? Logan asked himself again. He was a journalist. Any feelings of resentment toward Darius for putting him in this position were unfair. He had made a choice, like Lydia had.

Logan looked over at Darius. The tilted undercarriage of the bus just cleared their faces, and there was very little light. He could not make out the other man's expression, but his breathing was even and calm now. Apparently, he was neither weeping nor panicking. Good. Logan thought of the baby on the floor of the other bus, waving its arms and screaming as its parents pointed their guns.

"Tell me," Logan whispered, keeping his voice as low as possible. "Who are they? Do you know?"

He could hear the nylon of Darius's coat ghost against the plastic bags as the terrorist next to him shook his head. He moved, as quiet as an exhale, until his index finger lay against Logan's lips.

Silence. No gunshots, no answers. Logan listened to his heart beat in his wound.

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: I don't own DA. Sorry for the wait. I'm finding the Darius chapters easier to write, maybe because I know it's a dynamic that hasn't been done to death. Are you guys finding the Max-Logan chapters boring? If so, please let me know.

-2019-

Max turned off off the gas burner with a snap. "I didn't know Eyes Only did interviews." Without the flame's faint blare, the apartment was pitch-black to Logan's non-transgenic eyes. The sky outside the living room windows was the color of a freshly-washed chalkboard.

He heard Max make her way to the dining room without faltering. After a moment of fumbling in her pocket for matches, she became visible to him again, bending to light the tall tapers on the table. They served a practical purpose in a brownout, but Logan couldn't help but note how the candlelight haloed her hair auburn. She crossed back to the stove.

"He doesn't," Logan explained. "I mean, I don't. It was for the Pacific Free Press." He padded his lap with two dishtowels and carried the rice to the table. Max followed with the curry without speaking. He had set the table before she arrived, and put out a cold red-bean, tomato and cherry salad, as well as a carafe of water.

"Well," he said, setting his brakes, "tuck in, I guess."

"Thank god," Max said happily, sliding into a chair. "You know, I haven't eaten anything since the gyro I had for breakfast. My lunch break was all used up running a certain lazy cyberjournalist's errands."

"You ate a gyro for breakfast?"

"Yeah, a seven dollar special off a cart in Sector Ten." Her voice was rueful. "It's a steal, but who knows what kind of meat they make those things out of these days."

Logan smiled. "I only hope it had less cat in it than you do."

"Hey, I'm one hundred percent omnivore," she said, stuffing her mouth with potato and cauliflower. "Mmm, this is great."

"Thanks for your help with the cooking."

"Oh please." She put down her fork and spread her hands flat on the table on either side of her plate. "So. Spill."

"What?"

"You interviewed Darius for the biggest, squarest post-Pulse paper in Seattle. You've been flirting with the wrong side of the law for longer than I thought."

"That's not true," said Logan immediately. "I mean, not really." He paused, marshaling his thoughts. "It's sort of complicated. Darius was an assignment, but I always jumped at the chance to do anything controversial in those days. Working for the Free Press in the early 'teens, I felt like I'd gotten cheated out of being the kind of reporter I wanted to be." He paused. "I still fell like that sometimes, actually."

"What do you mean?"

"As Eyes Only, I'm less journalist and more detective -- and news anchor. Don't get me wrong, I like the detective part, but the broadcasts are so goal-oriented. I wish I could be more neutral."

"You can't afford that. Not after I put my ass on the line collecting evidence for those hacks."

"Don't worry -- I know." It was a product of the medium and the times. He'd accepted that long ago. "In a 60-second broadcast," he tried to explain, "everything has to be clear, and I am invested in people coming out with the right idea. I just get sick of doing heavy-handed sound-bytes sometimes."

"Wow. It's like a whole new kind of idealism I didn't even know you had."

Logan shrugged. "I want to write for a newspaper I can be proud of, with a readership whose intelligence I trust. I want to write stories where I do my research right, lay the facts out there, and sit back while my audience arrives at their own conclusions."

"Sounds nice."

"Yeah," he said. "I never had that. I wrote for the Yale Daily News while I was at school, and interned at the New Haven Register second semester of my senior year, but that was it. That was in the spring of '09."

Max nodded appreciatively in the candlelight. Behind her, raindrops he could barely make out slid thickly down the panes.

"My first real jobs -- in 2011, 2012, when newspapers were being printed again -- were to tell people comforting lies," Logan said. "The purpose of the media is to stir things up in good times and to smooth things over in bad. If people are really scared, they won't do anything at all. They won't leave their houses. They won't buy the paper. Publishers know this. It's their job to make everyone feel wary, but hopeful."

"'Wary but hopeful' sounds OK," Max pointed out. "Isn't that what you're going for with the hacks, sort of?"

"I guess you've got me there," Logan admitted.

"So why did they let you interview Darius, if he was such a rebel?" Max asked.

"That was Nathan Herrero. He thought broadening his readers' horizons was a good thing. The higher-ups didn't always agree, but he got his way surprisingly often. He was a major bad influence on me."

"I can see that." Max ran her index finger around her plate and licked the sauce off the tip provocatively. "So he was once a Don Quixote type too? Didn't really get that sense while he was lying low with his honey." As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she dropped her gaze quickly to the table. "Sorry -- I don't mean to speak ill of the dead or whatever."

Logan smiled. "That's all right." A couple of months ago, she would have defended Herrero's position as simple common sense. Somehow, Eyes Only had become her standard of moral behavior. Logan was proud of her, and of himself.

They were not sitting across from each other, but at two adjoining sides of the table, where she was close enough for him to smell her Kendra-made shampoo substitute, but positioned strategically so that they didn't have to look each other in the eyes unless they made a special effort. Logan checked his own reflection in the dark glass and sat up straighter. His hair was a mess, and he had circles under his eyes. He looked old.

Two years ago, in a similar situation, he would have grabbed her hand to see what she would do, or leaned across to kiss her on the cheek. Maybe she would have blown him off, but at least he would have found out how she felt. Like Jon Darius, Logan thought, he hadn't used to limit his tilting at windmills to his professional life.

It wasn't about his newly adjusted -- not to say reduced -- circumstances, he thought, not directly. He'd had the sex talk from Sam Carr. Things would be different on his end, sure, but if nothing else, he wouldn't mind Max sitting on his face. His caution wasn't about that; he had simply developed a lack of willingness to push a woman who wasn't showing clear signs of interest.

Not newfound self-consciousness about his nonfunctional lower half, but a polite accessory sensitivity to women's feelings? Who are you trying to fool, Cale, he told himself. He was simply not as willing to get shot down as he had been in his pre-shot-down days.

But it was Max. There was no "similar situation" two years ago, or ten. She was one of a kind. She would make any guy think twice.

Not that Eric kid she had dated, though. Not Josue from her jailbait past, apparently. Not even Sketchy. What gave these men courage he didn't have?

She would make any _reasonable_ guy think twice. That was the viable distinction.

"There was going to be pudding," he said. "Cinnamon raison. But I didn't get it in the oven before the electricity went."

Max pushed back her chair. "Just as well. I'm stuffed."

"You going somewhere?"

She shrugged. "Dishes, then home, I guess. You have plans this evening?"

"Oh, I'll be here for the foreseeable future. You mind keeping me company for a while?" he asked, trying to sound casual. "Without power, the elevator's out."

Max drew her brows together. "Man, that blows big time. How many brownouts are there a week?"

"I do spend a lot of time stuck on the 27th floor," he conceded.

"Pretty ironic, for an acrophobia."

"Yeah, it's a laugh riot."

Her eyes narrowed immediately, and Logan could see that he had lost her sympathy. The way she was willing to turn on him was something he appreciated, but sometimes resented. "You could move," she said. "You could afford it."

"And give up this view?"

Max stood and stretched in one fluid movement, the cartilage in her neck popping softly. "You're not fooling me, Logan. You never look."

TBC


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: It's been a while, I know. Sorry. I don't own Dark Angel.

-2014-

For the next weeks, Logan couldn't get the underside of that school bus out of his head. He and Darius lay side by side for over three hours, listening to the sounds of each other breathing and the ambient noise of life going on in the Lot around them. They never heard sirens.

They left the hiding spot separately, without discussion. When Logan pushed his way out of the trash he'd used to barricade them into the space between the bus and the world, he felt like Rip Van Winkle, emerging from a bed of drifted leaves after decades asleep.

None of the people he passed on the way out looked at him strangely. His jacket was black, and didn't show where he'd bled. He pulled up his collar and put his glasses in his pocket, flattening his hair with his hand before he headed for the gap in the north side of the fence, near the empty, scuffed plastic-and-aluminum box where a guard had sat in order to watch over the parked busses in better days. He didn't know who, if anyone, was watching for him now, but he wasn't challenged. His car was right where he had left it, like nothing had happened.

Logan decided not to go to the Emergency Room for the gunshot wound -- which was, after all, a graze. He had his friend Tejas, a second year resident at Metro, take care of it in his bathroom on her afternoon off. He thought of this as a favor to Darius, although he couldn't say why he felt he owed the man anything.

Nothing showed up about Lydia in the papers, of course, or in the Free Press editors' trash cans. Logan didn't know if she'd gotten out OK, although the rational part of him doubted it. He wasn't sure if the incident had been reported to the cops at all -- there were ways he could find out, but he didn't. He didn't want to alert anyone who might be watching these channels, for his own sake and his paper's, as well as for Darius. Logan didn't know if the May 22nd founder had escaped the Lot alive.

He thought about it sometimes: Jon Darius's body lying underneath that bus, arms at his sides, fingers relaxed, flies in his eyes. A bullet in his left temple -- the side of his body closer to the perimeter fence, the side Logan's absence had left exposed when he crawled painfully out of the space next to the terrorist. He could be there, still.

Mostly, though, Logan thought about those three hours when they were both under the bus, how they had lain there waiting to be found, two bodies in a coffin, Darius with his arms crossed over his chest, a sharp elbow digging into Logan's side. It was a good thing he was afraid of heights, not tight spaces.

It's the job, Logan reminded himself. Comes with the territory.

Part of him had always hoped to become the kind of journalist who was worth enough for bad people to want to stop him. Now, Logan had had guns pointed at him, had almost taken a bullet, but it hadn't been about him. It was the company he kept. Jon Darius was the kind of stoney-eyed idealist that put off even people like Logan Cale, and the May 22nd Movement had murdered innocent people. For all Logan knew, he had more in common, politically or ideologically, with whoever put the hit on Darius than he did with Darius himself, but because he had agreed to interview the man, he had become a target.

The shooting was a taste of something to which he'd secretly aspired for his whole censored, Pulse-fucked career, and it was sobering to remember how scared he had been. He was still scared now, every day. He had hoped he would be braver, when it came down to it.

Logan had the interview saved as an mp4 on his desktop. Maybe these constituted Jon Darius's last words, or maybe, if they weren't, an article to that effect published by the Free Press would have been a welcome decoy for the man who had, again, dropped below the radar.

Maybe, but Logan wasn't suicidal. It wasn't like Darius was his friend.

No, Logan had confronted his own death under that bus, as best he could, and now he had to get back to business. He was a journalist. Jon Darius's enemy list was a long one, with no obvious leads. Assuming that the man and the woman who attacked them inside Two Cousins were hired guns, Logan focussed on them, hoping the trail might then connect back to their employers. Logan researched hit men and assassins, concentrating his search first on North Korea, then on South Korea, too. He didn't find much. He searched the Seattle court records for adoptions of white children by Korean parents. There were none. He even asked his Korean-American friends, who were mostly amused or insulted by his questions.

Then one day about two months after the shooting, a man knocked on the side of Logan's cubicle. He was a white guy in his thirties with curly brown hair and a beard, wearing a tattered sweatshirt, and Logan had never seen him before. "Logan Cale?"

"That's me."

"He wants a meet." The man put a white paper envelope on his messy desk.

Logan didn't ask who. He reached for it as the man retreated toward the door of the newsroom. "What if I don't want to meet?" Logan called to him.

The man glanced at him, puzzled, and shrugged.

Logan looked around to make sure that none of his colleagues were paying attention, then opened the envelope.

October 15, it said. 8:00 PM. Wild Waves theme park, Federal Way, Washington. Logan knew it: the home of the highest roller coaster in the state.

TBC


	9. Chapter 9

A/N: I still don't own Dark Angel. I have this story mapped out to the end, now, so updates will be regular. I don't have a beta, so I'd love to know what you think.

-2019-

"As soon as I learned that you hated heights, I started to wonder what you were doing up in here," Max said. "One day you just woke up and thought, 'Hey, I should buy a penthouse'?"

"Well, I had a ranch once, when I was with Val. A ranch-style house, that is," Logan amended, anticipating Max's reaction, "not a home-on-the-range. All on one floor, no stairs. It was painted white, and we mowed the lawn all the time. As soon as we cut it, it would spring back up." It was strange to smile at the memory of a time in his life when he had been unhappy, but something about tonight, maybe the candlelight, had put him in a storytelling mood. Max seemed to share the feeling; she sat back down in her place at the table, toying idly with her fork. "It was surreal," Logan told her, "kind of like an old sitcom -- except that the Sector Eleven cops didn't have the upper hand out there yet, and we got broken into all the time."

"All the time for real?"

"It's not much of an exaggeration." Logan counted quickly on his fingers. "Lets, see, eight times, in the year we lived there? This was in '13, and as I understand it, there was a heroin shortage of some kind on the entire west coast that spring. All the Seattle junkies were breaking into houses for whatever was in the bathroom medicine cabinet ..."

"Fiending for anything. Yeah," Max nodded. "I sort of remember. What did you guys have that was so damn irresistible?" she asked.

"Oh, it was nothing personal," said Logan. "It was happening to the neighbors, too. No one ever took much from us. Val's drug of choice was ... well, you already know that. And this was before I started collecting." He gestured at the walls of the dining room, where paintings he could barely see hung in the dark. "When I was married, I was trying to live a different kind of life, a simpler life. I started to acquire stuff after I pared down the other complications."

"So you weren't scared, even knowing that someone was probably just gonna gank your ass again?"

"To be honest? Not even as uneasy as I am now when I look out those windows. I was young and foolish and I thought I had nothing to lose. Val didn't like it, though. Maybe that's part of why she drank so much."

"Huh," said Max. She never seemed to have much to say about Valerie. Logan supposed it was a sore subject because the only time the two women had met, Max had been put in the awkward position of telling Logan his ex was trying to play him for money. "This was before you got all up on the fighting crime and corruption game, right?"

"Yeah." Logan considered. "I guess leaving Val was kind of a dividing line for me. I started doing riskier things as a journalist, and I moved up here."

"Stupid."

Logan shrugged. "We're all going to die some time, Max." He had figured that out the first time he got shot at, and the second time was a brutal reminder. The third time would probably kill him, and he told himself that he was as ready for it as he had to be. "A person can live every day, being scared. You know that."

"Duh." She looked at him sharply. "But why would you choose to?"

"It's a tradeoff," Logan said. "I keep doing the Eyes Only broadcasts, even though they make me enemies, because I think Seattle is worth it."

"OK. Fine. Good. That doesn't explain why you insist on living on the 27th floor of a building when you can't climb the stairs and the everyday view outside makes you want to hurl." Max looked down at the surface of the table. "Sometimes, I feel like you're slumming it or something. For kicks. I have to live this way -- watching for the black helicopters that might be coming is one of the standard-issue Manticore curses, along with the heat and the shakes and the goddamn fucking dreams I have. But you, putting your life on the line every time you get a chance, going into the Steinlitz when there are perfectly good SWAT teams standing by ... why would you do that? It's like --"

"Like I don't know my place?" Logan asked dangerously. "Just because I can't run any more doesn't mean I'm going to stay at home. Get that through your head right now, or get out."

He had gone into the hotel for Max, to try and keep Max safe. It was hard to let himself believe that he was good enough for her, when she so clearly didn't believe it.

Max stood, eyes flashing. "All right, I'll go right on ahead and bounce while you're trapped here so that you can resent me while you wait for the power to come back on! Sound like fun?" Her voice grew louder. "This is not about your wheelchair, dumbass! Believe it or not, not everything is. It's about your death wish!"

"I don't have a death wish," Logan said coldly. "I take calculated risks. Like I said, I know Jon Darius. Knew him," he corrected himself. "We had a trust relationship."

"Oh yeah, clearly." Max walked toward the windows, her back to him. "You were the perfect hostage negotiator: light and aerodynamic."

Logan found that he was squeezing his tires with all the strength in his grip. He made himself take a deep, calming breath. "Did anyone ever tell you you were a brat?"

She placed her hands flat on the glass. "That's not quite the word they used at Manticore, no."

"I don't care where you grew up, I think you need to think about the way you treat people." He pushed off from the table and turned, leaving her alone.

TBC


	10. Chapter 10

A/N: How're you guys doing? Still there? I do not own Dark Angel.

-2014-

Logan stood under the abandoned Timberhawk: Ride of Prey. When it was built, it had been Washington's biggest roller coaster, and Logan guessed that its record had not been surpassed since. The last time he'd gone to Wild Waves was almost two decades ago, the summer before he was sent to boarding school. The years had not been kind to the amusement park, located half an hour south of Seattle, where he was supposed to meet Jon Darius. It had gone feral. Fetid rainwater stagnated in reservoirs on the derelict thrill rides and water slides alike. The midways and walkways were covered by wind-carried trash. Some of the tracks and cars had been scavenged for their metal componants, but the Timberhawk, constructed right around the turn of the century, was a nostalgia-style wooden coaster, and it loomed into the autumn sky above Logan now, intact but imposing against the pines. He didn't see any signs of squatters around here, and couldn't blame people for staying away.

He almost hadn't come himself, but his curiosity about Darius and what he was doing -- and why he wanted to see Logan -- had gotten the better of him. Once he had decided, he found that he missed being with Val, if only for the reassurance of knowing that someone would be around to notice if he was still gone in the morning and call the police or Herrero.

Obtaining a one-day sector pass that would allow him leave and reenter city limits hadn't been too much of a pain, but slipping the barbed wire that now enclosed the park was no picnic, and once inside, he realized that the Darius hadn't said where he would be on the several acres of park grounds. There was nothing to do but wait.

"I used to love this place."

Logan jumped about a foot, then tried to camouflage the movement by reaching for a pack of cigarettes. He didn't smoke often -- cigarettes were hard to get -- but holding a prop in his hand made him feel more at ease. "Jon," he said, self-consciously finding a book of matches. "How've you been keeping?"

Darius looked like crap. The last time Logan had seen him, he had guessed that they were around the same age, but Darius seemed years older than that now. Though he was still cleanly shaved, his goatee well defined, he was pale and the skin under his eyes was puffy and mauve with stress. He was dressed in a turtleneck and a Mariners baseball cap that was as grimy as if it had been used to bail the sludge out of one of the water rides.

"Fine," Darius said shortly. He did not inquire about Logan's bullet-grazed arm. "I'm glad you could make it."

"It was no trouble."

"Come sit," Darius said, pointing to a picnic bench near a wooden tombstone which Logan hoped was part of the hokey Wild West-themed decor of this section of Wild Waves and not the genuine article.

"I think Darren Jakovski is the man who wants me dead," Darius said, when they were settled. "Those people, on the bus. I've figured out who they are. The government didn't send them, but they're involved."

Logan took out his handheld recorder. "Should I?"

"Please don't." He looked at Logan with candid, steady eyes. "What I'm about to tell you, I'm telling you because I'm hoping you'll be able to help me, but also because it ought to be brought to the attention of the public. It's important. I'm kind of putting myself on the line, letting anyone who doesn't absolutely need to know my location near me, but I believe that I can trust your integrity. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I'll listen to what you've got, off the record." Logan stopped for a minute, thinking of a class he'd taken at Yale, Journalistic Ethics and Standards. "You have my word that I won't sell you out," he said.

"I appreciate that." Darius glanced over his shoulder. Logan saw a distant male figure standing under the Wild Wagon ride, but Darius seemed to expect him there.

"So, Jakovski the shipping guy?" Logan asked.

Darius nodded. "Revenge for the Expediters International strike. Not May 22nd's finest hour, but I would do it again, if I had to."

Logan inhaled sharply. He was talking about causing the deaths of two hundred and twenty people.

"But that's neither here nor there," Darius continued. "I bet you think I deserve it." He shrugged. "That's understandable. And despite the fact that calling a hit on someone is illegal, I'm not guessing that the police or the military command of the state of Washington would be too concerned about my predicament either, which is why I'm staying low to the ground just now."

"You've always stayed pretty low to the ground."

Darius shot him a crooked smile. "Thanks. Anyway, Jakovski is _my_ problem. What I wanted to tell you about is who he hired."

"The Koreans? I couldn't find anything on them."

"They're not actually Korean -- they just speak Korean. And Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew, from what I understand. They're a military experiment, made right here in the U.S.A. I think maybe I mentioned them in our conversation last month?"

Logan had reviewed the interview recording before coming. "Genetic research?" he asked. He remembered, suddenly and clearly, how the male attacker had bent backwards to dodge a bullet.

"That's right. They're building supersoldiers, and we've had the rare privilege of seeing them in action. They're called X4s. Just a second." He looked down at his cellular phone, then lifted it to his ear. "You can see that I'm fine, Jesse," he said, his tone short. Logan wondered again what it was like to live as a wanted man. "No, better make it ten. Yes." Darius ended the call. "I'm sorry about that."

"What was with the baby?" Logan asked. "In the bus?"

"Served the same purpose as speaking Korean in front of us. A decoy, I think."

"What happened to it?"

"I really don't think that's the relevant detail," said Darius. Logan realized that he hadn't asked about Lydia, Darius's previous bodyguard, who had remained in the bus during the assassination attempt to cover their escape. Now, it seemed too late. "A program like what I'm dealing with here, though," Darius said, "where they train the soldiers from infancy? They probably produce some spares. Duds."

Logan felt a little sick. He noticed that his cigarette was burning his fingers. He dropped it to the pine needles and extinguished it underfoot.

Darius nodded toward the butt. "I haven't seen any of those for a while."

"Would you like one?" Logan asked, a polite reflex.

"No, thank you." The terrorist ran a hand gently over the surface of the picnic table, where kids had scratched their initials forty years ago, bounded by hearts. "I'd like you to use the resources at your disposal to find out what you can about this program."

The way he said it, the presumption of this man who had himself been responsible for ending innocent lives, rubbed Logan the wrong way. "Excuse me, but why should I do that?" He couldn't bring himself to say aloud that he wasn't sure Darius deserved to be alive, but the thought crossed his mind.

The look in Darius's bright eyes was questioning, almost pitying. "The military is testing human subjects at taxpayer expense with no oversight or consent, Logan. This would be the story of your life."

He was right, of course. "Yes," Logan said. "I'll get you what I can."

Darius handed him a manilla folder, which Logan opened. The item on top seemed to be a computer printout of a budget. The file was almost an inch thick. Darius or his people had spent some time preparing this.

"What if I had said no?" Logan asked.

"I always go for what I want," Darius said. "What would I get by worrying about asking?"

TBC


	11. Chapter 11

A/N: The rights to DA are not mine, and I am using these characters without permission from the owners with no intention of making a profit. If you're still reading, it would be nice if you'd holla at me, though.

-2019-

Max found him in the kitchen. If he had really wanted to be alone, he would have gone to his bedroom, where she never ventured, but no. As angry as she made him, he wanted her company desperately. You're pathetic, he reminded himself.

She had one of the candles in her hand and the dishes from dinner were stacked in her arms, as many as she could carry. She piled them on the counter without saying a word. Logan opened the dishwasher just as silently and began to load. They took fastidious turns.

He watched her, bending like a dancer to fit the glasses upside-down in their places on the wire rack. Her hair hung down in her eyes. She could never risk wearing her hair pulled back.

"Do you know what it was like, having to sit next to him?" she asked at last. "I wanted to die, and I had to pretend nothing was wrong." Her face was turned from Logan. "You can't train a child not to be afraid. We always were, all the time there, as much as we had gotten used to ... a lot of bad things. We had to pretend. I sat next to Lydecker and watched him watch that little kid on stage and I imagined I was a statue of someone brave. I can still feel that squeezing in my chest." She looked at him, her eyes dark as crushed velvet. "Like I always felt. Like I never left. The very worst thing. Like being thrown from a roof."

Logan took the salad bowl from her hands. He had never heard her talk like this before. He couldn't imagine what she had gone though in the hotel, and yet, here she was, comparing her experience to his. "It was worse for you," he said carefully. "You were very brave."

She shrugged. "Manticore shorties better raise they weight."

She always did this when things started to get too serious, tossed off something unintelligible in Jam Ponyese.

"Yes." Logan watched for her reaction, trying to anticipate whether she would snap at him. "You take risks too, you know," he reminded her. "You do dangerous things that you don't strictly have to do."

He had been scared for her, since he met her, more times than he had been scared for himself. He had felt a flash of real anger yesterday, when they crashed down together on the bed after she saved his life, because she was supposed to be out and away. He had never known that he was capable of that kind of deep-down selflessness.

Max half-turned, a hand on her hip, one of her typical back-talk poses, but when she spoke, her voice was modulated and calm. "A lot of times, you're the one who asks me to things that aren't healthy. Other times, you try and tell me not to."

"We're both adults," Logan said. "We have a professional relationship, right? We make our own decisions. Could we maybe both try to trust each other?"

"Yeah, that sounds fair. It's easy to say, anyway. I just feel like someone's gotta worry for you, sometimes. Now that you don't have --" she kicked the dishwasher door closed "-- Val. God. It seems like we spent the whole night talking about your old girlfriends."

"Tell me about Josue, then. To even things up."

"Who?"

"Your boyfriend," Logan said. "Josue." Yes, he thought. Definitely a professional interest.

"Oh, him. We weren't even like that. I mean ..." She was blushing now as she realized how that sounded. "No. We were, in a way. We did some stuff, swung low a little, maybe, but we were friends. I guess maybe he thought we were together, but ... It was just a couple months that we knew each other."

What she was trying to say, Logan thought, was that there were others. This guy was only part of her secret life, a blip on the screen. Fine. He looked up at her. "This is not what I was asking," he pointed out gently.

"Right. Josue. I don't know how old he was. Older than me. He played guitar and was a serious v-game worker -- taught me every hustle I knew. He stripped cars with his cousin, too, but that was side-salad. Josue was a small guy, and he would just blend into the wall behind him sometimes, which is a skill I could appreciate. He lived in this apartment with, like, ten other people and actually paid rent for the room, instead of bribing the cops." Max smiled at the memory. "His roommates weren't crazy about me being there, so I had to sneak in and out on the fire escape, without making it look too easy, you know? Eventually, he caught a case and got sent up to Everett, though. I never saw him again." She drummed her nails against the counter. "He was sweet to me, when he was around."

"I'm sorry. I mean, about the ..."

"What else?" Max interrupted, finished with the sad part of the story. "He was born in California, but his mother came from Peru. That was the best thing about him. The 'rents lived pretty close by -- near where I live now. They were nice, and man. The food! Articuchos, I think they were called, and papas a la huancaína. That was a potato dish."

"I've had it before," Logan said. "There used to be a Peruvian restaurant in New Haven I liked. I wonder if I could cook it. You'd like cerviche, too, if I could get the citrus."

"Don't bother," said Max. "I just eat American food now."

"Funny," Logan said. "Because most of the things I cook for you are Italian."

"Oh," said Max. "Really?"

"Curry is Indian."

"OK, I knew that.

"Gyros are -- theoretically, anyway -- Greek."

"Fine! You win!" She put her hands up in playful surrender. "You know, we have fought so much today. I don't need this."

"I know you don't," Logan said, feeling too battered to joke. He was still hurt by things she had said, but he was weighed down by guilt, too, and urgent in his sorry longing for something more from her. Quid pro quo, he thought. We each bring up things the other wants to forget. Maybe she should just leave, so he could take an OxyContin and go to bed.

"What I really would like to do is sit on your couch," Max said. "Aiight?"

Logan looked at her. "You bet," he said, without hesitation.

All business.

TBC


	12. Chapter 12

A/N: I do not own Dark Angel.

-2014-

The last time Logan Cale saw Jon Darius was four months after the meet at Federal Way. The summons came, like before, with an apparently nonnegotiable date and place, although this time, it was delivered to Logan at the Pacific Free Press office by a young Latina woman he hadn't seen before. He didn't argue with the messenger, and two days later, he waited outside outside the Glowworm Tavern in Sector Four as she had instructed, his hood pulled up against the drizzle, a data disk in his pocket.

The Glowworm was dark, with a glass-brick facade, but no front windows. Logan stood under the overhang of the next building and waited, watching the people hurrying in out of the weather. Finally, Darius drove up in a car, a 2010 Prius in almost-new condition. He rolled down the window without turning off the engine. "Get in."

There was no one else in the car, but Logan assumed Darius's ever-present bodyguards were somewhere nearby -- maybe in the tavern already. "We're going inside, right?"

"No." Darius turned on the windshield wipers. "Not safe."

Logan got into the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt. "The spot you chose isn't safe? You're paranoid."

"I'm not dead yet," the other man pointed out calmly.

They drove west on quiet streets without speaking. After a few minutes, Darius pulled into a municipal lot near, but not over, the Sector Three border. The streetlights weren't lit here, but the floodlights from the checkpoint two blocks away lit most of the parking lot dusty-bright. The Prius idled silently in the long shadow cast by a dumpster.

"What are we doing?" Logan asked.

"This is as good a place as any to talk."

"No." Logan nodded toward a maroon Crown Vic driving slowly past them, southbound on Malden Avenue East. "Keep driving."

"What?"

"It's a DT car -- plainclothes cops."

Smoothly and immediately, Darius pulled out of the lot, turning onto 15th Street toward East Aloha Street and the residential neighborhood bordering Volunteer Park, his headlights misting in the rain. He didn't look back. "How do you know?" he asked.

"I know them," Logan said reluctantly.

"You have quite the network."

"I try to cultivate friends." Unlike you, Logan thought.

"That's why I asked for your help," said Darius, as if in answer to what he hadn't said. He brought them to a stop at the empty intersection of 15th and Aloha. He put on his left turn signal, but after a moment, he flicked it off, like a man who had reached a decision about something. They continued on 15th, parallel to the park. Despite the light rain, campfires were visible in the shantytown through the brush.

"Where are we going now?"

In answer, Darius pulled up in front of a house, one of a nondescript row, each run-down, with robbery bars fitted over the windows and hard-packed dirt for front yards, but all generously sized, and turned off the engine. "Come on."

Logan followed him down a driveway, where Darius lifted the unsecured garage door halfway and ducked underneath. The garage was dim and cluttered, with two motorcycles and a moped parked inside, but no car. Darius began to unlock a series of three locks on the door leading to the house. "Here," he said, ushering Logan inside. "Please take off your shoes. There's wall-to-wall."

Was this where he lived? Logan wondered what he had done to merit such trust.

The living room contained only a scuffed black leather couch, a glass-topped coffee table, and several cardboard boxes. Logan, who had expected tall shelves of books, like his father's study, looked around curiously. On the coffee table was a month-old issue of one of the underground newspapers to which he, under an alias, sometimes submitted articles, along with a second newspaper too radical for his personal comfort, and a gleaming, empty aluminum ashtray. "It's a safe house," said Darius. He sat at one end of the couch and touched the ashtray, moving it across the table with the tips of his fingers. "Could I, uh ...?"

"Bum a smoke?"

The other man looked slightly embarrassed. "Only if you have an extra."

Logan handed him his matches and pack. "Thank you," Darius said. He lit a cigarette clumsily. "Expensive habit."

"I try not to make it a habit." Logan said. "At some point, there will be things you just can't get anymore."

"Is that really cause for regret?" Darius leaned back against the cushions. "I remember growing up before the Pulse, my mother used to take me to yard sales. One time, we went to this estate sale at the home of an old man who had just died. He was a real hoarder. His kids had gone in and pulled all his junk out of the rooms and were selling it out on the front lawn. This would have been in the late 'nineties, I guess. The thing I remember vividly is that there was an unopened box of Hostess twinkies from the nineteen-sixties. The packaging was still bright and perfect. It was a collector's item, and I'm sure some collector brought it home it that day." He looked up at Logan. "I was disgusted. I couldn't stop imagining the twinkies inside. It was like finding a dead body. My mother explained to me that because of all the preservatives in them, they were probably fine. I think that's the stage we're at now, as a society. We're clinging to the mistakes of the past. We're collecting them and devouring them, because in a broken world, we're nostalgic and we're hungry. That's not the way. May 22nd is about finding new possibilities for living."

Logan felt like they'd stepped right back into the interview that had been interrupted by gunfire months ago. "You know, a lot of people characterize you as stuck in the past," he said.

"That's a misconception," said Darius.

"Look." Logan curled his socked toes against the rough carpet. "I know this isn't why you wanted to see me. I have some information for--" he cut himself off. It wasn't for Darius. He didn't owe him anything. "About the thing. I tracked down a lab tech from the base in Wyoming. I didn't want to push too hard yet, but I gleaned some basic information about the X4s who are hunting you, and about the ... newer models."

"Do you have enough for the article?"

"No," said Logan. "And the Pacific Free Press wouldn't publish it, anyway." He bent to pick up a newspaper from the table. "And it wouldn't matter if the Agitator or the People's Record did. This is bigger than that."

"What do you want to do?" said Darius. His eyes shone above shadows that had accumulated like bruises. Every time Logan saw him he was more tired, more hunted, and yet each time, he seemed calmer than the last. This is a man who has learned to live under a Sword of Damocles, Logan thought.

"I don't know," Logan said, wondering what the other man would ask him, wondering what to say when he still wasn't sure if protecting Darius from assassination was even the right thing.

Darius tapped ash from his cigarette and stood. "I'm reluctant to tell you this, for your sake, but I can't think of what else to do. Jakovski, the man who called the hit, is no longer going to be a problem for me." He looked at Logan steadily. "He won't be in a position to pay for my death."

TBC


	13. Chapter 13

A/N: We're nearing the end now. Thank you for your kind comments. DA and its characters are not mine.

-2019-

All the candles were out. The living room was dark. With the usual night-glow of the high rise district beyond the big windows extinguished, Logan could barely find his way to the couch. Luckily, he kept the floor clear. Max sat down beside him.

"What's it like to be able to see in the dark?"

"I dunno, Logan. What's it like not to?"

He tried not to shudder as she leaned comfortably against his shoulder, as if they did this every day. He breathed in her scent -- patchouli oil and bitter orange and some unnamable scavenged ingredient from her shampoo.

"Your face looks funny, when you don't know I'm watching you."

Logan's heart skidded in his chest. "Does it?" he said.

"Oh yeah." Max stretched, and then settled back. "I beat up your friend, you know. Darius."

"Really?"

"Mmm," she said. "He shot at me. Sort of pissed me off."

"I'm a little angry at him myself."

"So, he used to be a good man?"

"No," said Logan. "I wouldn't say that."

"No?"

"He was behind a massive bombing of a global logistics and freight-forwarding concern," Logan told her, imagining thirteen-year-old Max, oblivious, a girl who jammed quarters into a video-game machine in an arcade or a bar, grinning at her mark to put him at ease and wondering where she would sleep that night. It had all happened in the same city. "Killed more than two hundred -- not all of them employees. And then he took down a software development company later the year I interviewed him. Shot the CEO point-blank in the face, I think. And lots of smaller things. Civilians died. But he had his own rules, and he played by them." Logan shifted a little, gently, so as not to give Max an excuse to move. "I didn't see him as the hostage-taking type, but maybe I should have -- he was always reckless in his pursuit of what he saw as the greater good. Still, when I knew him, he was careful. Talking to him yesterday, he sounded crazier than I remembered-- more paranoid. But, then, they've been after him for ten years, now."

"It's hard to live life on the run," Max said quietly. Logan reached for her in the dark, his hand almost brushing her forearm, then pulled back. Where did this amazing empathy of hers come from? He understood how hard she tried to hide it, and was touched whenever she expressed it in his presence.

"Darius wasn't a good man, but I'm very sorry that he thought I betrayed his trust." _Their word means nothing,_ Darius had said, at the end. _Neither does your life._ Logan was glad Max hadn't been there to hear. "I never meant to."

"If he knew you, he would know that," Max said.

"He always thought the government would get him. He'd probably be glad that they didn't take him alive." Logan wondered who had actually fired the bullet that killed him. It didn't matter: Jon Darius was gone. He brushed his palm absently along his thigh. Another person dead who'd known him when. "He's the person that first told me about Manticore."

"Really?"

"Yeah, about five years ago. I thought it was an urban legend, but then he introduced me to some X4s."

"What?!" Max jerked away from him.

"By that I mean they tried to kill us. And one of his contacts hooked me up with the lab tech I told you about. I was going to do a big exposé."

"And?"

Logan shrugged. "The tech disappeared. Got cold feet or was made to disappear, I don't know, but no one from Manticore ever came after me, so I'm guessing the former."

"So you never got your chance to pop the trunk on them."

"You know. You've seen everything I have. I didn't think I could get more without going to Wyoming, and Seattle was always my priority." Until you, he thought. "If I'd done more ..."

"It wouldn't have helped me or my graduating class," Max said. "That's what would have mattered to me then. Now, I think it might have been worth doing anyway. I always imagine that the way to go would be storming in there and busting grapes, though -- not blowing the whistle and waiting for someone else to legislate their asses."

"Your style versus mine," said Logan ruefully.

She laughed. "True that."

"What do you think would have happened to Manticore, if you'd let Lydecker die yesterday?" he asked.

"Don't know. I'm not sure what the command structure looks like, above him, but there's got to be someone. What will happen to May 22nd now?"

"I hope they'll disband. I really have no idea."

She leaned back and put her head in his lap. "You comfortable enough, with me like this?"

"Yes," said Logan. He couldn't feel her against his legs, of course, but she was so near. He should do something, like stroke her hair. What would Jon Darius have done? Asking himself that in this situation was, he realized, the very definition of Max's term "bent."

"Would you have killed him?" Max asked. "If it were him or the hostages?"

Logan thought of Edgar Sonrisa, and the bitter rush of triumph he had felt when he learned that he was dead. He thought of the other deaths that he had probably caused. If he answered no to that question, it meant that as Eyes Only, he had turned into the kind of person who would let others do his dirty work.

He remembered Darius's long fingers and his bright intelligent eyes. The May 22nd founder had believed in absolute definitions of right and wrong, in sacrifice. "I think every life has inherent worth," Logan said. "But yes, I would have shot him myself. And not just because he had me thrown off the top of the hotel."

"I know," said Max.

Outside, the lights came back on. Logan had turned off the living room light as he came in from the kitchen, so the penthouse remained dark, but he could see her again, illuminated by the glazed skyscrapers around them. "What's the worst thing for you?" Max asked. "Is it really heights?"

"No," said Logan. "Not heights. Not dying. Making the wrong decision, maybe, and knowing it. Hindsight. Or prophesy. Knowing something will happen and being powerless to stop it."

TBC


	14. Chapter 14

A/N: I do not own Dark Angel. Forgive me my trespasses.

-2014-

Logan felt something drop in his stomach, like a chunk of cement. "You're going to have him killed."

"Yes. Look, the wheels are in motion on this already," Darius said. "Even if I told you more, you wouldn't be do anything in time, trust me. You are not responsible."

"Great," Logan spat, "just fucking great." The spartan living room in the house on East Fifteenth Street had no windows, only a set of sliding glass doors, the deck outside obscured by a set of blinds that allowed light to fall across the carpet in a pattern of stripes, like one that a planted forest or prison bars would make. He felt physically ill.

"I'm telling you this because of my respect for you. I've got my part of this taken care of. You don't have to worry any more about whether it's wrong to help me, and you don't have to publish an article before you have the facts and the platform to make everyone listen."

"You think I would ever rush into something for your sake? Fuck you."

Darius dropped his cigarette end on the glass table, missing the ash tray by an inch. "I'm trying to make this easier for you, but I see that that's impossible."

"Why bother?" Logan asked. "If it's so much trouble." He realized what he sounded like, but didn't care. He fingered the disk in his pocket. He didn't know if he was relieved that Darius was out of danger, leaving him free to do as he saw fit with the information he was collecting. It was simpler to be angry. A man was going to die; the fact had been presented to him like it had happened already, and he could not edit it.

"I'm telling you," said Darius, "because I like you." He looked exhausted in a way he hadn't before. "I used to get fired up when I saw people who had it easy, people who seemed to be able to live their lives without thinking. It seemed so fundamentally wrong to me. I thought the Pulse and its attendant plagues of hardship and struggle would change things, but it hasn't, not in that way. Very few have become mindful. This is still a nation of sleepwalkers."

Logan thought of his coworkers at the Free Press, joking about police shooting rioters and changing around the numbers. How could a public reading what they printed ever be conscious of what was going on?

"If anyone deserves to have it easy, it's you, Logan." Darius reached out his hand, put it around Logan's waist, hugging the small of his back. "I think the reason I can say that to you is that I know you never will."

He moved his face toward Logan's, and Logan knew perfectly well what was going to happen before the other man's lips touched his. Logan's eyes were open, and he could see the texture of Darius's cheek and the fact that his eyes were squeezed shut. Logan closed his as well, feeling that this was only fair. The safe house around them was quiet.

A car passed by on the street outside, and Darius pulled out of the kiss. "I'm married," Logan said. It was the first thing that came to mind, for some reason, even before I'm not gay and You're a militant terrorist.

"You're fairly young for that," said Darius.

"We're getting a divorce. We're separated. I'm pretty sure it's best." Logan curled his hands into fists, feeling his fingernails bite into his palms.

"I'm sorry," said Darius. They stood in silence for a time. "There's no one else here, you know."

"Isn't that tactical exposure?"

"I like to live on the edge."

Logan smiled, first at the obvious lie, and then at the more obvious truth behind the lie.

Darius took a small step forward, arms at his sides, body language open. "You don't usually do this, do you?"

"Most married guys don't."

"Don't be so sure."

Logan stuffed his fists in his pockets. "Do you think I'm a good person?"

"Yes." said Darius without hesitation. "Can I kiss you again?"

His goatee was scratchy against Logan's chin, and his arms were strong. It didn't feel bad. They shifted, and their teeth clashed together, sending a spark of surprise and pleasure down Logan's spine. He pressed closer, but the rock in his stomach wasn't going away.

He drew back, and took a breath. "What about Darren Jakovski? Is he a bad person?"

Darius closed his eyes, and Logan knew what would say. The answer didn't matter, even if it was the truth. He shouldn't be here, when time was so short. He felt for the edges of the data disk with his fingers.

The next day, there was a headline in the Pacific Free Press about Jakovski's death. There had been a car bombing outside his building, early in the morning. The culprit or culprits were uncertain, although the May 22nd Movement had already assumed responsibility.

Herrero had someone else cover it. Logan Cale was out of the office.

Logan drove back to Wild Waves, and sat under the Timberhawk, trying to remember what it had been like as a kid, back when the Old West section of the park looked less like a jungle. The wooden crosses of the scaffolding supported tracks that plunged from the height of a skyscraper. Logan tried to recall what corn dogs had tasted like, but he was tired from the hours of frantic and futile telephone calls after he left the safe house last night, and they had become estranged from his memory, like an exotic cuisine he had learned to love and then lost. All he could imagine was cigarette smoke in his mouth.

He wasn't worried about writing up the interview, any more. That was part of his job. What he needed was to find a way to send the message.

(JUST ONE MORE.)


	15. Chapter 15

A/N: I don't own the rights to the characters depicted herein, nor am I making any money from their use.

-2019-

Max breathed easily. Logan imagined that her head must be heavy on his lap. From the couch, he watched the bank of computer equipment in the corner spark back to life. He realized, suddenly, that the Eyes Only broadcast -- his first one, too rough to air -- must be backed up somewhere in his files.

At the time he made it, the week after Jakovski's death, he had scoured the Web for any image of Jon Darius. He found one, finally, on a personal site maintained by one of Darius's old ELF colleagues. The photo wasn't captioned, but Logan recognized him, severe in a black sweater, looking thoughtfully away from the camera at a laughing friend, the can of beer in his hand almost out of frame. That, and Darius's old mug shot from his arrest in 1999, was all Logan had to work with.

The rough broadcast Logan put together did not use the format for which Eyes Only would later come to be known. There was no voice-over by him. All of the audio came from the interview Darius gave.

Logan mentally ran through it now. It had been short -- less than sixty seconds -- and he'd spent so much time on it, he could still play it in his head. It began with stock footage of the undamaged Expediters International building before the attack, cued to Darius saying, "We need to step up to the challenges posed by the Pulse. The military state has to step down." The next shot was the picture of Darius at the party, cropped so that only his serious face was visible, followed by a shot of a woman carrying a sign that read MAY 22ND FOR A NEW DAY! "Our national and state governments have turned a blind eye," Darius's voice said. Another shot of the Expediters International building, the first bomb going off, and then, as it began to crumble, a second explosion nearer to the foundation. A shot of a pamphlet reading _May 22nd deplores violence against citizens!_ "I'm not Robin Hood or Che Guevara," Darius said. A shot of the wreckage outside Jakovski's house, blood and safety glass scattered in the street. "The movement isn't the destabilizing influence I hope it will someday become." A shot of people digging through the rubble at Expediters International for survivors. Then, there was a blank screen, with the legend DO THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS? The video ended with the old arrest photo of Jon Darius. Bands of red and blue covered most of his face, exposing only the sad, swollen eyes of the boy he had once been. "It's about priorities," his voice said.

After tinkering with the video for months, Logan had finally dismissed it as too ambiguous, too off-message for an audience. Besides, he had told Darius that he wouldn't sell him out. If the broadcast had aired, Logan told himself, it wouldn't have stopped the attack on SofTek or the May 22nd bombings that followed. It wasn't strong enough. Still, he had come away from the experiment, five years ago, wondering what he could accomplish with a simple hack and a minute of everyone's time. The video was the beginning.

Max stirred, burrowing the back of her head into his legs. She squeezed her eyes closed like a child, her forehead wrinkling up and then becoming smooth again. "I'm so tired," she said.

Maybe, Logan thought, he should pull up the old footage and show it to her. Maybe it would explain what he couldn't about who Darius was. "No wonder," he said tenderly. "You've had a long week." He broke off. "Wait, tired as in sleepy?"

"Mmm. It happens. Rarely. Can I just crash here on the couch?"

He brushed a dark curl away from her forehead. Sometimes, he told himself, you have to go for what you want. You don't get anything by not asking. "What if I carried you to bed?"

"Do you think you could handle that?"

"Absolutely, if you lean off of me for a second." He grabbed for his chair and transferred into it, then paused to plan his next move.

Through the glass, the neighboring buildings glittered mercilessly. There was nothing wrong with looking out, not down.

"In the morning," Logan promised, "I'll make you crepes."

"Crepes?"

"Pancakes," he clarified. "Whatever."

FIN.

_Endnote: I'd like to thank all of you who stuck with me on this for the eight-plus months that it took. This was my first DA story, and I rarely write things this long. I enjoyed reading your comments along the way._


End file.
